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VIVID-Med: LLM-Supervised Structured Pretraining for Deployable Medical ViTs

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • VIVID-Med is a novel framework that uses a frozen large language model (LLM) as a structured semantic teacher to pretrain medical vision transformers (ViTs), translating clinical findings into structured JSON formats.
  • The approach introduces answerability-aware masking and Structured Prediction Decomposition (SPD) to improve optimization focus and extract complementary visual features, enhancing performance.
  • After pretraining, the LLM is discarded, resulting in a lightweight and deployable ViT backbone suitable for clinical deployment.
  • VIVID-Med significantly outperforms existing models like BiomedCLIP on CheXpert linear probing while using substantially less data, and demonstrates robust zero-shot cross-domain and cross-modality generalization.
  • This method provides an efficient and scalable alternative for medical image analysis, reducing reliance on resource-heavy vision-language models in healthcare applications.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09109 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:VIVID-Med: LLM-Supervised Structured Pretraining for Deployable Medical ViTs

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Abstract:Vision-language pretraining has driven significant progress in medical image analysis. However, current methods typically supervise visual encoders using one-hot labels or free-form text, neither of which effectively captures the complex semantic relationships among clinical findings. In this study, we introduce VIVID-Med, a novel framework that leverages a frozen large language model (LLM) as a structured semantic teacher to pretrain medical vision transformers (ViTs). VIVID-Med translates clinical findings into verifiable JSON field-state pairs via a Unified Medical Schema (UMS), utilizing answerability-aware masking to focus optimization. It then employs Structured Prediction Decomposition (SPD) to partition cross-attention into orthogonality-regularized query groups, extracting complementary visual aspects. Crucially, the LLM is discarded post-training, yielding a lightweight, deployable ViT-only backbone. We evaluated VIVID-Med across multiple settings: on CheXpert linear probing, it achieves a macro-AUC of 0.8588, outperforming BiomedCLIP by +6.65 points while using 500x less data. It also demonstrates robust zero-shot cross-domain transfer to NIH ChestX-ray14 (0.7225 macro-AUC) and strong cross-modality generalization to CT, achieving 0.8413 AUC on LIDC-IDRI lung nodule classification and 0.9969 macro-AUC on OrganAMNIST 11-organ classification. VIVID-Med offers a highly efficient, scalable alternative to deploying resource-heavy vision-language models in clinical settings.
Comments:
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09109 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09109v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09109
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Xiyao Wang [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:42:51 UTC (8,745 KB)
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